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So that must have been interesting. Gov. Paul LePage made an unexpected appearance Wednesday at a state budget forum with state Sen. Cathy Breen, D-Falmouth. The forum is one of several that Democratic lawmakers are hosting in their local districts across the state, an effort designed to deliver their take on the budget directly to constituents. LePage has been on his own budget road tour, but apparently decided to pop in at the […]

The Legislature’s budget writing committee engaged in its first public tussle Monday evening with a vote that wouldn’t have been necessary if not for the ongoing dispute between Republican Gov. Paul LePage and Democratic Attorney General Janet Mills. At issue was whether lawmakers should circumvent the governor’s authority to issue a $28,000 financial order that’s needed to leverage federal matching funds for the AG’s Medicaid Fraud Unit. The proposal stemmed from […]

No apology from Governor LePage. Some guys are a lot better at dishing it out than taking it back. — Stephen King (@StephenKing) March 22, 2015 Anyone else getting the sense that Stephen King isn’t going to let Gov. Paul LePage wait out this tax/residency dustup in the bunker of silence? First the bestselling horror writer said the governor is full of — you know — for implying that King claimed […]

Governor Paul LePage implied that I don’t pay my taxes. I do. Every cent. I think he needs to man up and apologize. — Stephen King (@StephenKing) March 20, 2015 Clearly, the Master of Horror is not satisfied with a corrected weekly radio address. Bangor resident Stephen King sent the above tweet Thursday evening following a wave of national news stories detailing how Gov. Paul LePage had claimed […]

Author Stephen King turned Gov. Paul LePage’s effort to kill Maine’s income tax into a horror show for the governor Thursday. In a weekly radio address LePage’s office released on Wednesday, the governor erroneously said that King, who owns property in Florida, had moved to the Sunshine State, presumably to avoid paying income taxes to the state of Maine. The remark prompted King, a legal resident of Maine and frequent […]

Lawmakers on the Environment and Natural Resources Committee took nearly three hours of testimony Monday on L.D. 467, a bill that would have narrowed a resource protection area known as the Saco River Corridor. And then, after a brief caucus, the committee quickly killed the bill. It’s unusual, although not unprecedented, for a legislative committee to hold a public hearing on a bill and vote to defeat it in […]

Good morning, It’s Franco-American Day at the State House and the speeches and presentations are likely to crowd out some of the legislative activity. The committee schedule is relatively light. There’s a public hearing on L.D. 537 in the Education Committee. The proposal would prohibit standardized tests on students in grades kindergarten through grade 2. The Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee could potentially vote on L.D. 197, a proposal that […]

Good morning and happy Sunshine Week. The recognition of government transparency is apropos. Hillary Rodham Clinton, a likely candidate for president, held a press conference last week to explain her use of a private email server and to tell reporters that she’d deleted half of the messages. Clinton’s purge is presumably because the messages contained the intricacies of hot yoga, but at least one columnist believes the entire performance event boiled […]

Maine has a long history of high voter turnout and the 2014 election was no exception. In fact, the Pine Tree State led the country last year. The group Nonprofit VOTE compiled turnout data certified by state election officials. It found that Maine led the country with 58.5 percent turnout among eligible voters. Wisconsin was second (56.8 percent) and Colorado (54.5 percent) was third. Interestingly, Colorado does almost all of […]

State Sen. Michael Willette, R-Presque Isle, said Wednesday that he has no intention of resigning his seat after apologizing from the Senate floor for a number of offensive Facebook posts about Muslims, immigrants, race and President Obama. Senate President Michael Thibodeau, R-Winterport, has said that the matter is settled, even though Senate Democrats have requested a formal statement against racism and xenophobic comments by their members. Nonetheless, the Maine Democratic […]